The present invention relates to an information system which enables us to manage smoothly a construction project or a development project, and a work flow in daily operations. More specifically the present invention relates to a function of supporting management and exchange of various kinds of information relating to execution of the project and the work flow, its user interface method, a system for realizing this, and a device for realizing this.
In this connection, the project management mentioned in this specification means that information relating to execution of one or more operations (tasks) is properly managed, processed, and provided for the purpose of executing the tasks smoothly.
In addition, the information relating to execution of the tasks includes, for example, the following: resource information such as personnel, equipment, or costs, which are required for the execution of the task; time information such as work time, or scheduled starting/ending time; related information such as a document, data, or a URL (Uniform Resource Locator) corresponding to an Internet home page address, which should be referred to at the time of the execution; a purpose, and steps, of the execution; order relation with other tasks; and risk information relating to the tasks.
Moreover, in addition to a project of plant construction and a project of software development, the project management mentioned in this specification includes wider concepts, for example, execution management of daily operations, and management of a work flow which is in particular a chain of fixed operations.
As a tool used for project management which lays emphasis on circulation of a document as described above, there is known a workflow system describe in, for example, “Advanced Workflow Management system” by Haruo HAYAMI, Memoirs of Information Processing Society of Japan, Vol. 39, No. 11, pp. 1160-1165, 1998.
Nevertheless, it was difficult for the technique to manage tasks and related information such as documents synthetically while realizing data association between tasks.